Alabama, USC coaching hires have parallels and struggles

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USC Trojans head coach Clay Helton during warm ups. The USC Trojans played the University of Arizona Wildcats at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Los Angeles, CA. 11/7/2015 (photo by John McCoy/Los Angeles News Group)

USC’s coaching succession of Pete Carroll, from left, Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian and Clay Helton have followed a blueprint similar to Alabama’s. Coaches who have a previous connection with the college were selected to take the reigns of the football team.

It’s 33 steps to the top of the observation tower sitting by the football fields in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

It long marked Bear Bryant’s perch.

Bryant routinely gazed out from the tower to watch practices, images of him peering down serving as some of the lasting snapshots of a legendary coach who led the Crimson Tide to six national championships in a 25-year tenure.

Then they took it down.

When Bryant retired after the 1982 season, successor Ray Perkins no longer saw its need. The practice tower was dismantled in his first season.

“Some felt it bordered on near sacrilege to remove the edifice,” the Tuscaloosa News reported at the time.

A few years later, when Perkins had left and Bill Curry stepped in as the Crimson Tide’s headman, Curry fielded a phone call from Ellis Taylor, one of Bryant’s closest friends.

Taylor pushed for the tower’s reconstruction.

“You need to put that thing up as fast as you can,” he told him.

Curry laughed.

“Well, how soon are you going to let me hang up this phone?” he said.

Its return quickly followed.

Taylor’s pitch was easy. Curry understood how so many fans, boosters and alumni revered the tower. When he was a scout with the Green Bay Packers a decade earlier, he stopped by to watch practice in 1975.

Bryant summoned Curry up the 33 steps with his bullhorn.

“It was like ascending into a heavenly layer of cloud cover,” Curry said earlier this month in a phone interview from Georgia. “Honestly, it was just amazing to stand up there with him for an hour.”

When Curry oversaw the tower’s reinstallation, it came with a catch.

As Bryant was no longer the coach, no one was permitted to climb to the top of the tower. It remained a sort of shrine to a man who retired as the winningest coach in college football.

His success left an imprint.

“If it were Greek mythology, it would be Zeus with a thunderbolt,” Curry said.

It was striking enough that Alabama often sought to replicate the Bear Bryant era in the years that followed.

“They wanted to hold onto that, because those were good times,” said Tommy Hicks, a longtime Alabama columnist who authored two books about the Crimson Tide.

The connections were aplenty.

Perkins, Bryant’s replacement, played for Bryant in the early 1960s as a wide receiver. Other hires included Gene Stallings, a former Bryant assistant at Alabama and defensive back at Texas A&M; Mike DuBose, a former Bryant defensive lineman; and Mike Shula, a former DuBose quarterback.

Over 24 seasons between the tenures of Bryant and current head coach Nick Saban, four of the six coaches tabbed to lead Alabama had previous ties to the school (not including Mike Price, who was hired and fired before coaching a game).

It is a succession blueprint USC has similarly followed in the aftermath of the Pete Carroll era.

The Trojans won two national championships in nine seasons under Carroll, who is widely credited with returning the program to prominence and left as one of its most successful coaches.

USC’s three hires since Carroll returned to the NFL in 2010 were Lane Kiffin, a former Carroll assistant; Steve Sarkisian, a former Carroll assistant; and Clay Helton, a former Kiffin and Sarkisian assistant.

Helton begins his first full season Saturday against the top-ranked Crimson Tide in Arlington, Texas.

“In college football in general, at big programs, that’s the tendency, to hire someone in the family,” said Don Wade, the author of “Always Alabama: A History of Crimson Tide Football.”

The track records for the schools’ familiar coaching hiring has been mixed.

Since Carroll left, the Trojans have finished the regular season with double-digit wins just once — 10-2 in 2011 under Kiffin. Carroll achieved the feat seven times in nine seasons. The last Rose Bowl appearance was also under Carroll to bookend the 2008 season.

The NCAA placed USC on probation in 2010.

At Alabama, Perkins went 8-4 in his first fall, but went 5-7 in 1984, marking the first losing campaign for the Crimson Tide in almost 30 years. Jennings Whitworth finished 2-7 in 1957. Bryant was swiftly hired for the next season.

Perkins’ best season was his fourth and final one in 1986 went he won 10 games, capped with a Sun Bowl victory.

He never measured up.

“At a place like Alabama when you’re trying to follow Bear Bryant, the thinking was the way you ease that transition is you have a Bryant discipline so to say,” Wade said. “The problem with that is nobody else is Bear Bryant. You’re always kind of going for a cheaper cut of the original when you go down that path.”

When Alabama attempted to hire someone with no previous ties to the school like Curry, who came from Georgia Tech, the university president received death threats, as did Curry and his family.

Curry, who took over in 1987, became the first non-Alabama graduate to be the school’s football coach in 30-plus years.

“It was very hard on my family, my wife, my children,” Curry said. “I heard some things. It’s just what people do. It’s what fans do. We understood it, but it was difficult for them.”

In 1989, Curry led the Tide to a share of their first SEC title since the Bryant era, but left for the same position at Kentucky. Frustration had mounted while Alabama went without a national championship in his three seasons.

Reprieve came in 1992 when Gene Stallings led Alabama to a national title, its only finish atop the polls between Bryant and Saban.

“He was as much a Bryant protege as anyone could be,” Hicks said. “Played for him at (Texas) A&M. Coached like Bryant in respect to just kind of how they approached the game. Discipline, things like that.”

He hired several former Bryant assistants and players to his staff.

Stallings could not be reached for this story.

Perhaps among the immediate successors to Bryant, he best ingratiated himself with fans.

“What they really crave, what they want in their heart of hearts, is they’d love to have one of their own,” Curry said, “one of Coach Bryant’s boys, as the way they put it. … At the time, that’s what they very much wanted.”

Kiffin’s first staff at USC included several notable Carroll assistants, including defensive coordinator Ed Orgeron and offensive coordinator Kennedy Polamalu. Orgeron served as the interim coach when Kiffin was fired mid-season in 2013.

For Alabama, which also went on probation in the early 2000s, its fate changed when it lured Nick Saban away from the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. Saban took over in 2007.

Saban had no previous ties to Alabama and had won a BCS national championship at SEC West rival LSU in 2003.

“That was wise,” Curry said. “You take a great football coach and a great tradition like that and they become very hard to beat.”

In 2009, Saban’s third season, Alabama won a national title.

Saban left an imprint from the start.

“He definitely wanted things done his way,” said Greg McElroy, a former Alabama quarterback under Saban and SEC Network analyst. “There wasn’t ever a doubt who was in control of the program. When I’m talking about control of the program, I’m talking about every single possible aspect of the program, from meals to how much time we were spending in the weight room, how much time were spending at study hall, to how much time we were spending with each individual coach over the course of a season, how much coaches are going to be on the phone with one particular recruit.”

The size of Alabama’s support staff grew significantly.

An ESPN story documenting this trend earlier this month reported Alabama had 146 non-coaches working in its athletic department.

The results are clear.

Under Saban, Alabama has won four national championships and been ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press poll 43 times (58 percent of the school’s all-time No. 1 rankings).

From Nov. 3, 1980, until Oct. 26, 2008, in Saban’s second season, Alabama was atop the poll only once.

Curry sees a lesson to draw from hiring a proven outsider like Saban.

“In the coaching business, it’s very dangerous to get into the lineage,” he said, adding. “Because somebody coached on a staff with Vince Lombardi, doesn’t mean that he’s going to be a great head coach. You should find someone who’s a great head coach, no matter who he coached with and hire that person. That doesn’t mean they might not be (one) if they worked for Saban, or (John) McKay or whomever. But it’s certainly not a guarantee.”

Joey Kaufman is the USC beat writer for the Southern California News Group. Since joining the Orange County Register in 2015, he has also covered Major League Baseball and UCLA athletics. His work has been recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors and Football Writers Association of America. Kaufman grew up in beautiful downtown Burbank.

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